Short Order Writers Wanted. Must be willing to write for 20 minutes. No Grammar Snobs Need Apply.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Day trip to Glasgow Central – Part 1.

Back in the mid 90’s one of our more
socially inept friends surprised us all by announcing that he wanted a career
change.He’d been a dry-liner since the
age of 16 making really good money while the rest of us were either on income
support or at college doing our best to drink our student loans and funding as
many nights out as possible to the local pubs and clubs.

Snakes decided that the dry-lining business
wasn’t for him anymore, so he retreated to his bedroom at his mams house armed
only with an Amiga and a copy of Deluxe Paint II and taught himself how to be a
graphic artist.

At the end of his self-imposed exile he had
produced as show reel which was impressive and creepy in equal measures being
as its centre point was building from the local graveyard in which we’d spent
an inordinate amount of time doing “research”.The research of consisted of taking us taking LSD after nights out and
sitting in the dark cemetery to see what we could see.The answer being all sorts of things most of
which to this day I couldn’t tell you if they were real or not.

The giant bowl of cereal from The Big
Breakfasts “Get Your Knobbly Nuts Out” was definitely not real.Nor was the fact that the building turned
into a giant Kerplunk but after that the jury is still out.

Off the back of his show reel and some
coaching from his friends on how to appear normal in an interview he landed a
job with a bona fide gaming software house in Glasgow.At the time they were working on some big time
games and won a few awards.Buoyed by
their success the company decided to reward their staff be taking over a city
centre bar for an evening and providing free drinks for all staff and their guests.

This is where we came in.Snakes obviously having a mad rush of blood
to the head invited me and a couple of pals to the do and the attendant free
entry into the next door club where Jeremy Healy was playing that night.

Now I’m not a lad’s night out, stag do,
jolly boys outing kind of bloke.Mostly
because I’m wildly anti-social and mixing with people makes my knuckles
itch.I was however prepared to make an
exception as the booze would be free and Snakes is an old time mate and we’ve
got a lot of (nefarious) history together.

We rounded up the required “supplies”,
booked the train tickets and a hotel through our mate’s missus and departed on
the 13:30 to Glasgow.

There were three of us in our little train
crew.Me, Yorkshire Rick and Bryn.Peado Paul was making his own way up in his
car and was to meet us at the hotel.Snakes was primed to meet us at the train station so nothing could go
wrong.The organisation had been
conducted with military precision so nothing could go wrong.

The first thing that went wrong was that we
thought the journey would be en-livened by some amphetamines before hopping on
the train and then cans of LCL as we talked a load of bollocks through to our
destination.

Three blokes all talking at 100 miles an
hour boarded the packed train.No matter
that we didn’t have seats we simply sat outside the toilets on our bags and
cracked the cans open waiting for the conductor to come round.He duly appeared and after looking at our
tickets pointed out that we were on the Edinburgh train not the one to Glasgow
Central.This caused some heated speed
fuelled debate amongst out little group accompanied by much swearing and
gesticulation of lager cans.

Deciding that discretion was the better
part of valour he told us we could get off at Edinburgh and hop a train across
to Glasgow only needing to pay for a ticket for that part of the journey which
we could get from the machines at the station.“Happy Lads?” he said backing away as quickly as possible.“Mint, cheers mate” came back the reply as we
cracked on with talking shite.

The journey carried on in this manner
enlivened by the odd dab here or there and more cans.A polite older asian guy stepped over Rick
who at this point had forsaken sitting on his bag for lying sprawled on the
ground and went into the toilet.

After a few minutes he stuck his head round
the door and asked if we know the sink worked so he could wash his hands.This was an older style train and to get the
water out of taps you had to pump it with your foot so Rick hops up, explains
to the guy how it all hangs together, tells him to cup his hands and operates
the foot pump for him.

What you don’t want in this situation is a
speed fuelled Yorkshireman operating your foot pump.He went at it as if someone had told him he’d
get a pound for every pump.The bloke
was soaked.He had chinos on and by the
time Rick stopped pumping he looked like he’d thoroughly pissed himself.

“Fuck’s sake Rick, you can stop now”.The Asian guy sloped off back to his seat as
we cried with laughter and decided that the situation called for a celebration
in the form of an E each just to take the edge off........